This Blog Covers Techno Legal Issues Of Internet, Mobile And Social Media Censorship In India For Digital India, Aadhaar, Natgrid, Etc By Twitter, Facebook, Google, Etc. Technology Companies Of India And US Are Silently Censoring Critical Contents About Indian Govt From Time To Time. This Is Defeating The Right To Speech And Expression Of Indians And Their Right To Know.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Recently Google negligently issued a Blogger Blog takedown notification. As we create original contents and do not pick others contents, we have decided to take appropriate legal action against the offending party. If it is attributable to the negligence of Google, even Google can be held liable for such negligence.

We have sought more details from Google in this regard so that we can decide our course of action. We have sent the following mail to Google:

“Dear Google

Thanks for your mail.

However, your communication and action is totally misplace and is wrongly executed. We have checked our contents thoroughly and not even a single word has been picked from other platforms.

We always produce original contents and our contents are picked by others.

It seems to be a mala fide DMCA complaint and we wish to take action against the offender. Kindly issue us the copy of the DMCA compliant so that not only can we file a counter notification but also take appropriate legal action against the offender, if any.

Even there is a gross negligence on the part of Google by making the post a draft. Google has neither checked the veracity of the compliant nor has it provided any information to us to check the same.

How can we analyse that we have violated the copyright of any person/organisation if the information is not provided to us? We also could not find any such information at Chilling Effects.

As a matter of fact we believe that Google has committed a mistake by acting in the manner in which it has acted.

Kindly restore our contents to original state immediately”.

Now we are waiting for the response of Google and once such response is received we would decide the future course of action in this regard.

A company like Google is presumed to be an organised and properly managed one. Not necessarily. Today we received a notification from Blogger platform that reads:

”Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to \"draft\" status. This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again.”

We produce original contents and we do not lift contents of others. So prima facie the DMCA complaint filed with Google is mala file and wrong. Even Google is negligent in changing the status of our posts as draft without verifying the truth of the claim either itself or with our assistance.

The notice further reads:

”A bit of background: the DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. If you believe you have the rights to post the content at issue here, you can file a counter-claim.

The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling Effects. You can search for the DMCA notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Chilling Effects search page and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed.”

Till now Google has not provided us any information as to how we violated the copyright of any person or individual. Even a search at Chilling Effects has not produced any results. Clearly, Google has wrongfully suspended the posts without application of its mind.

On top of it the notice reads:

”If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account. Repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in further remedial action taken against your Blogger account including deleting your blog and/or terminating your account. DMCA notices concerning content on your blog may also result in action taken against any associated AdSense accounts. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain your own legal counsel.”

It is clear that there is no copyright violation on our part. Rather Google has been used as a platform to harass us and Google willing complied to do so without examining the truth of the compliant. We would publish our response to Google soon.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

In the previous post we have covered the methods used by Google and its Affiliates to censor, manipulate or otherwise tamper with the SERPs, news and blog search results. In this post we are trying to analyse the reasons behind such behaviour of Google and its Affiliates.

The reasons for censoring and manipulation of SERPs, news and blog results by Google and its Affiliates are as follow:

(1) As a direct result of censorship requests from governments and law enforcement agencies of various nations, including India.

(2) To protect the interest of online advertisers who advertise with Google and it Affiliates. If non paying and free services are appearing at the first page of Google SERPs, etc then there is no motivation for paid advertisers to purchase Google’s services.

(4) Intellectual property rights (IPRs) violations may result in not only removal of offending contents but even offending websites and blogs are punished in case of repeated infringements. For instance, blogs on Blogspot platform may be deleted, suspended or demoted depending upon the facts and circumstances of each case.

(5) Splogs and contents farms websites are frequently punished by Google. However, in many cases these Splogs and contents farms are also responsible for punishment of original, genuine and useful websites and blogs. Contents lifted from these original blogs frequently appear at Splogs and Google punishes the original blog owner for the wrong doing of the Splogger. Presently Google seems to have been defeated by these Splogs and content farms.

(6) At Perry4Law Techno Legal Base (PTLB) we have been observing that bad neighbourhoods are deliberately picking up our contents and linking back to us. Google’s algorithm is fooled due to this practice which considers bad neighbourhoods and Splogs as original source of contents and punishes the original and genuine blogs.

(7) Negative search engine optimisation (SEO) also uses the same method as discussed in point (6) above. Due to negative SEO Google believes that a genuine and original website is engaging in spam behaviour but in reality this is not true. But Google still punishes the original and genuine website due to bad and malicious behaviour of others.

We would add more reasons to this list from time to time. If you have any idea or recommendation in this regard, kindly contact us and share your views.

Friday, March 2, 2012

We are compiling a list of methods that Google uses to mess up, manipulate SERPs, blog search and news results. This is based on our own personal experience and research. If you are aware of any method in this regard, kindly contact us and inform us about the same so that we can incorporate the same here.

According to us, Google uses the following methods:

(1) Putting posts in duplicate contents category in news category thereby making it unavailable in the main category.

(2) Temporarily removing the contents from news, SERPs, blog search, etc so that its relevance is gone for contemporary news and topics. Further, this also allows non controversial posts to get a better place in Google’s SERPs and other search results.

(8) By attaching a 503 “services unavailable” error with the post to be censored and making it unavailable. You can analysis this fact and error at your webmaster tool.

(9) By manipulating the robots text file (robots.txt) and blocking post(s) through such robots. txt file. This is done in such a manner that you cannot find any clue, hint or proof of the same even through the webmaster tool.

We would update the list on regular basis. If you think a particular method should or should not be there in the abovementioned list, kindly drop us a line. We really appreciate the valuable inputs of our readers.